Why is Low Code So Trendy?
There is likely no tech buzzword gaining more adoption in 2020 than “low code.”
The suddenly popular term refers to a development platform that allows user to create application using an easy graphical interface instead of requiring software coding skills. The main advantage? A low code environment enables staffers with limited tech skills to build and enhance software.
The net result is a company infrastructure that is far more nimble and robust than it would be if skilled developers had to make every tweak and build-out.
In truth, the trendy concept is not new. In one form of another, “low code” has been around for more than twenty years (think WYWSIG web development in the 1990s). Low code has gained new – and urgent – credence circa 2020 because the need to respond to a rapidly changing market requires companies to be more agile than ever before.
To provide insight into the future of this key technology, I’ll speak with three leading expert:
Hinchcliffe: Low code is the ability to create a software solution with little or no programming. There’s even no-code. And you can drag and drop solutions and create some basic functionality. But increasingly, you can wire together systems, integrate them, create sophisticated solutions for thousands of users, and do it by your lonesome without knowing anything about really about programming.
Suer: The other thing that’s really driving low code is digital transformation. So suddenly, IT is now not just making a great back office, not just building an operational backroom, it’s building how we make money. And the variety in ways that you want to interact become enormous. All of those things together are saying, “I’m gonna have to do a lot more work in order to succeed, and I better have different ways of doing this, so that I can move much more quickly.”
Sacolick: I think CIOs woke up in March and realized they had to digitize their environments, that they had to provide workflows that were being done in the office by moving paper or having discussions and meetings between people. All of a sudden, they need to put up safety applications, they need to put information resources for people finding help and getting some more automation in their service desks.
And they realized, “We’ve done so much work over the last few years moving to the cloud and using Agile and putting DevOps in, and now we can do applications in six months.” Well, that’s not going to work, right? I’ve got to do applications now in weeks.
Suer: I think COVID is a huge pusher on [driving low code]. There are several groups that I’m aware of, one is a university in Australia that didn’t have any concept of remote work. And suddenly they had to get all these laptops deployed with VPNs, and they knew they couldn’t do it in regular coding, they had to build something fast in days, and so they used low code to do that.
Hinchcliffe: We need to tap into a much larger base, and there’s something like 26 times more non-coders than there are coders, and many of them are knowledge workers. They’re either system thinkers, they’re gonna adapt these logical tools and begin building solutions, so we need to tap into them.
And I don’t think it’s gonna be business analysts, it’s gonna be power users, knowledge workers that are very comfortable using IT, that will be creating a lot of these apps. And then IT will be finishing them and making them secure and making sure the data governance is there and rolling them out. IT needs a lot of help.
Suer: And so I think in addition to the fact that some things may just always be Low-code, there may be something out of the fact that you can get business users to really conceive what they really need, and then you put a serious developer on it, if it’s gonna be a mass application kind of thing.
